The last few days our development team has been wrestling with a particularly difficult technical issue with the Givvy site. Specifically, the our site was “leaking” memory on our servers to the degree that Givvy became unusable after only minutes of activity. For those of you who don’t know what a memory leak is, it’s when the server does something that needs memory, but does not give the memory back when the task is completed. Over time, the application holds more and more of the memory (think the card game War which ends when one player has all the cards). At some point the application has all of the memory available on the server and can’t do any more work because doing work requires more memory. Gridlock is the result…
Anyway, Seth and James both worked hard on understanding why this was happening and coming up with a fix (it works). It should be noted that this leak is somehow systemic to our PHP/Symfony/Lucene environment and was not caused by any of the code these guys wrote. That said - the problem seems to have been fixed.
Nice work, guys!!
Filed under: Development | Tagged: PHP, Symfony, memory leak, lucene
